One of the key features or innovations, how Nokia likes to put it, of the new announced Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820 Windows Phone 8 devices is the wireless charging capability. Indeed, no longer having to search the charger and just putting the device on the charging mat or Fatboy is not only quite cool but also really convenient. If you have read several previews of both new Lumias, you may have noticed that almost every blog or magazine has highlighted this feature as one of the key features.

However, is this feature really that new and innovative? Not really! This whole wireless charging technology is not as new as it seems. More than two years ago at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona I visited the Powermat booth – one of the hottest and most visited both of the whole congress. Back then I introduced Powermat like this on my blog:

Powermat is a wireless charging system and an aspirant for the hottest gadget of this year. Instead of having a spaghetti of cables for charging your various gadgets, Powermat confines all this mess into one simple and revolutionary mat.

Already back than I loved the idea of wireless charging and was quite disappointed that this technology never made it to the customer and to the big manufacturer. Also Germany’s biggest tabloid magazine BILD covered that topic and called it ”witchcraft”. So what took Nokia so long to implement this technology, as it was already 2010 available and tested? I don’t know. Nonetheless big respect to Nokia that they adapted that technology and put it into their two new hero devices.

What do you think about this feature and what doyou guess took Nokia so long?

Update:

I did almost forget to mention, that the original Palm Pre did features wireless charging already in 2009! Similar to the Nokia Lumia 820 you had to use a extra cover in order to enable wireless charging.